Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

John Milton's The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was published in February 1649, within weeks of the execution of Charles I on 30 January. The king's trial and beheading had split English Protestants. Many Presbyterians, who had fought Charles in the civil wars, recoiled from putting a monarch to death, and Milton wrote to answer them. He was an ally of the Independents and the army, and the pamphlet was a defense of the act itself, aimed especially at those who had opposed the king while denying that anyone could judge him. Within the year the new Council of State appointed him its Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

The argument begins from a claim about human nature and the order of creation. Men are born free, made in the image of God and answerable to no one by birth. Kings and magistrates are not lords over this freedom but trustees of it. Milton holds that political authority is derived from the people, who commit it to rulers for the common good and may therefore take it back. Rulers hold their power on tenure, as the title says, and not by inherited or divine right. A king who rules as a tyrant forfeits the trust, and the people may depose and punish him. Milton is clear that this does not require the unanimity or consent of the whole nation; those who remain faithful to the common good may act.

He presses the point against his Presbyterian opponents with their own history. They had taken up arms against the king and professed obedience to Scripture, so he marshals biblical examples and quotes the early reformers and Calvinist writers who had themselves defended resistance to tyrants. If Luther, Calvin, Knox and others had justified deposing wicked rulers, then those who now condemned the regicide were abandoning the principles of their own tradition. The pamphlet is as much an exercise in Protestant polemic as in political theory. It also carries Milton's conviction that liberty is a spiritual condition: a people who submit to tyranny are slaves in soul as well as body, and political freedom cannot be separated from freedom of conscience.

The treatise remains one of the clearest seventeenth-century statements that government rests on consent and that rulers are accountable to those they serve. It stands in the line of thought that later fed into Locke and the revolutions of the following century, and it shows how a Reformed Christian could reason from creation and Scripture to constitutional conclusions. It is also a window into the moral reasoning of a man defending a deed that horrified many of his fellow believers.

Who should read this: readers interested in Christian political thought, the English Revolution, or the theology of resistance and authority will find it rewarding, especially those willing to follow a tightly argued polemic with its seventeenth-century biblical citations. It is not a devotional work and offers no sustained reflection on prayer or the inner life. Readers looking for a measured, even-handed treatment of the regicide should look elsewhere; Milton is an advocate, not a neutral witness.